As another Democratic caucus finishes in the State of Washington, over 175,000 votes were cast without the use of a single calculator. The average caucus worker is also 76 years old.
“I’m pretty good at counting on my fingers,” said caucus counter Tom Phillips. “My fingers are meant for counting, not calculating. Gretchen does the calculating.”
Gretchen Wanniski, 82 years young, tallies up the fingers and does the addition by hand. “My vision is not as a great as it once was and I forget to carry the 3, 4, or 5, sometimes but I don’t trust calculators.
“Calculators can be wrong all the time. My pencil and paper are only wrong with odd numbers. When we run out pencils, I can remember the numbers in my head. Let’s see a calculator do that.”
In fact, no calculator has been used in a single caucus across the country. “With a voting system like the 1800s, we should use a counting system to match the time,” said Wanniski. “Calculators slow everything down. See these fingers? They don’t need batteries and don’t have complicated buttons.”
In states where the caucus vote was close, the margin of error could be as high as 20% said one pollster. “You have old people doing this stuff for free, how accurate do you expect it to be?” The pollster told BBC News. “From people counting people on their fingers depending on what side of the room they are sitting on is not the most scientific method.
“It’s a good method for a middle school field trip but maybe not so good for helping to decide the President of the United States in 2016.”